DAF Day Sees Exponential Growth in Year Two, Moving Millions in DAF Dollars to Nonprofits

DAF Day 2025 saw 4x the nonprofit participation and 6x the DAF participation from DAF Day 2024!

Chariot launched DAF Day in 2024 as a new, nation-wide initiative to elevate DAF giving. It was announced in July in partnership with a few dozen nonprofits, fundraising platforms and a handful of forward-thinking DAFs – by October, more than 1,000 nonprofits had signed up to participate in the giving day. The results pointed to millions of dollars moved from DAF accounts to nonprofits – and some organizations cited their biggest giving day ever.

In year two, we had ambitious goals to recruit more DAF participants, prepare nonprofits more effectively, and improve the DAF donor giving experience. We also wanted to analyze year-over-year performance in terms of DAF Day’s reach, education, and activation.

DAF Day's Reach

DAF Day serves as a shared moment – with a shared message – to build awareness of what donor-advised funds (DAFs) are, and how they can help donors achieve their philanthropic goals in a seamless, tax-efficient way. Participating DAFs and nonprofits actively promote the giving day to their audiences, creating powerful amplification around the country. This year we saw: 

• 30 participating DAFs (6x 2024) — including Thrivent Charitable, the Arizona Community Foundation, the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee, and many more

• 4.4K participating nonprofits (4x 2024) 

• 20K unique visitors to dafday.com (2x 2024)

Educating Nonprofits on DAF Fundraising

Despite DAF giving becoming an increasingly critical piece of nonprofits’ fundraising results, many nonprofit professionals still lack the resources needed to champion DAFs within their organizations. In the lead up to DAF Day, we wanted to provide accessible tools – such as marketing toolkits and a webinar training series – that DAF champions could use to promote the message both internally to their teams and externally to their donors. These materials saw high levels of engagement: 

• 17K interactions (e.g., deck views, template downloads) with various materials in the DAF Day Marketing Toolkit 

• 2.6K unique downloads of the Marketing Toolkit

• 10K interactions with the 13-part DAF Day Training Series (e.g., webinars & recaps) 

Activating Generosity

Because DAF giving happens through 1,000+ different DAFs to 1.5+ million different nonprofits, capturing a holistic and real-time assessment of a single day of giving poses challenges. The best way to capture the amount of giving is via the DAF providers themselves – this year, we had 20 of our 30 DAF participants share their single-day results. We aggregated this DAF data  and combined it with DAFpay statistics to tabulate: 

• Directly Observable DAF Day giving:

  • Over $2 million granted from over 1,000 gifts

  • Daffy, who promoted DAF Day both years, saw +70% growth from 2024. 

• DAFpay records on DAF Day: 

  • Record single-day volume: +150% vs. 2024  

  • Record single-day number of gifts: +42% vs. 2024  

  • Record number of unique organizations supported in one day: +57% vs. 2024  

Additionally, several participating DAFs observed a sharp increase in activity compared to DAF Day 2024, as well as a notable rise in new accounts created, new contributions or new fundholder leads. 

Spreading the Word

Organizations across the country – and around the world – took the message of DAF Day and creatively applied it to their own missions and communities. We saw: 

• DAF explainer videos featuring cats from Georgia

• A community foundation party in Sacramento decorating a cake to celebrate the DAF holiday

• Donor teach-ins at a diaper bank in D.C.

• Texts for international relief

• Website takeovers to save our oceans

• Postcards for parks

• Emails for local theaters

• Linkedin posts for hospitals 

• The adoption of DAF Day in Canada!

• And thousands more activations and communications of every kind  

We also introduced the DAF Day Giving Page this year, giving every DAF-eligible nonprofit access to DAFpay for their donors. 

There was also an unexpected treat on DAF Day – TIME announced the Best Inventions of 2025, which included Chariot’s DAFpay technology!

Key Opportunities for Next Year

More DAF partnerships: We were thrilled by the boost in DAF participation this year – it allowed us to more effectively spread the word about DAF Day and new capture metrics & insights. However, our partners comprised <2% of the DAF market – which means a lot of room for growth! We’re hopeful that the clear positive impact our 2025 DAF partners saw will only encourage more providers to join the effort for 2026. 

A Longer Campaign Timeline: While many DAFs and nonprofits discovered DAF Day sometime during the summer, many joined in on the initiative only a few weeks before October 9th. Next year, we want to make sure that as many participants as possible have enough time to outline their communications strategy – which means we’ll be providing resources & tools earlier in the year. 

Expansion of DAFpay: DAFpay continues to be the best way to make it easier for donors to give with their DAFs. We’re constantly expanding our list of fundraising platform integration partners – be sure to follow us to hear when your fundraising platform has enabled DAFpay as a payment option.

What Comes Next

This is only an initial summary of the outcomes from DAF Day 2025. In the coming weeks, we will also be announcing the winners of the first-ever DAF Day Awards and gathering more stats from participating nonprofits as they are available.

Mark your Calendar: DAF Day 2026 will be on Thursday, October 8th!